7 Best Led Tv Consumer Reports 2019 – Top Rated

With the latest in technology becoming more affordable and more accessible, it can be much easier to find a good TV without spending a ton of money. For those who have a higher budget, there are also plenty of TV options with all the features you could ever want or need for home entertainment.

Choosing the best TV for your home depends on the amount of space you have and the ways in which you plan to use your TV. Some are designed for use with the internet and make it easy to stream movies, shows, and other entertainment.

Screen Size

Perhaps the most important choice you’re going to make with a new TV is the size of the screen. TV screens are measured diagonally, and they range in size from fewer than 20 inches to more than 80 inches. However, not many people shop at the extremes. Televisions going into kitchens or small bedrooms might measure just 24 to 32 inches, but if you’re shopping for your primary TV, we recommend going bigger—say, a set with a 50- to 65-inch screen. You could consider an even bigger set for spacious family rooms or if you’ll be sitting very far from the TV.

While there are no hard-and-fast rules for determining the right size TV—personal preference, the field of view, and even visual acuity come into play—there are some general guidelines you can use. You can try one of the many online calculators that are available free or apply the following, easy-to-use, equation.

You’ll also have to pay attention to your budget. It’s possible to find good TVs selling for a few hundred dollars, while others go for several thousand, and there are many sets that fall in between those extremes. Screen size, features, and brand will all affect pricing.

Here are a few typical selling price ranges for several screen sizes:

• About $150 to $400 for a 32-inch model

• $250 to $700 for a 39- to 43-inch set

• $350 to $900 for a 49- or 50-inch set

• $450 to $2,500 for a 55- to 59-inch set

• $600 to $7,000 for a 60- or 65-inch set

Our full TV ratings are broken down by screen-size categories ranked by overall score, so it’s easy to see how well the TV performed in our tests and how much it costs relative to other sets of its size. Rule of thumb for sizing a 1080p TV: Screen diagonal = (Distance to the couch, in inches) divided by 1.6. You can go bigger with a 4K, or UHD, set.

Choose Between HD and Ultra HD

These terms refer to the TV’s native resolution. A regular high-definition (HD) set is also a called a 1080p model because its screen resolution is 1920×1080. That means it has 1,920 pixels horizontally and 1,080 pixels vertically, so it contains roughly 2 million pixels in all. Think of pixels, short for “picture elements,” as the tiny individual dots that make up the TV’s picture.

Ultra-high definition (UHD) TVs, also called 4K TVs, have screen resolutions of 3840×2160, so they contain 8 million pixels or four times the number of individual pixels as an HD set. The more densely packed array of pixels in UHD sets makes them capable of greater picture detail. The benefits of a UHD TV are more apparent in larger screen sizes—say, 65 inches and above—or when you’d like to sit closer to the TV than you could with a 1080p set.

High Dynamic Range (HDR)

As we previously noted, perhaps the TV industry’s biggest buzzword is high dynamic range or HDR. When done right, HDR boosts a TV’s brightness, contrast, and color, making the pictures on the screen look more like real life. As you can see in the dramatized image below, when HDR is at work, you’ll see details that might not otherwise be obvious, from the texture of the brick on a shady walkway to nuances in the white clouds in a daytime sky.

You’ll also see brighter, more realistic “specular highlights,” which are glints of light, such as the sun’s reflection off a car’s chrome bumper or an airplane wing. With HDR, those highlights pop; without it, they wouldn’t stand out against other bright objects.

Types of HDR

So far we’ve been talking about HDR as if it were just one technology, but there are a few types of HDR, each following a different set of technical specs.

One type, called HDR10, has been adopted as an open standard. It’s free to use, and all 4K TVs with HDR support it. That’s also true of all 4K ultra HD Blu-ray players and HDR programming, so you won’t be stuck with a set that can’t play HDR.

But some TVs also offer another type of HDR, called Dolby Vision, which is being promoted as an enhanced version of HDR10. Companies pay a licensing fee to use it. On paper, it has some advantages. In particular, it supports “dynamic” metadata, where the brightness levels for a movie or show can be tweaked scene by scene. In contrast, HDR10 uses “static” metadata, where brightness levels are set for the entire movie or show.

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